Kaye Dacus's Blog, page 30

#FirstDraft60 Day 25: Have You Done Enough Research? #amwriting #nanoprep #nanowrimo

Whether it’s figuring out where an event could be held, what the weather is like in a certain timeframe, whether or not your state has imminent domain laws, or specific details of an obscure battle five hundred years ago, you’re going to have to look stuff up. And what better time to do it than […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 24: Getting Specific with Your Setting #amwriting #nanoprep #nanowrimo

Do you know enough about your setting to be able to write a first draft without the setting becoming a stumbling block for you? Yes, I know we’ve already had a post about setting. But it was more about just setting up a space to collect information about the setting—and to get you thinking about […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 23: One-Sentence and One-Paragraph Story Summaries #amwriting #nanoprep

If you haven’t yet completed the assignments from Days 19 and 20, writing the premise and a basic outline of your story, never fear—today’s project goes hand-in-hand with those! The One-Sentence and One-Paragraph Story Summaries The one-sentence summary. The Quick Pitch. The Elevator Pitch. The Slug Line. It doesn’t matter what it’s called, if you’re […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 22: Sunday Reflections–Responsibilities, Priorities, & Writing Time #amwriting #nanoprep

On Sundays, we’re going to take a moment to step back and think about our writing from a wider view. In order to do that, I’ll post some guided questions—feel free to answer them here with as much or little detail as you’d like; or answer them on your own blog or on Facebook. Or […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 21: Saturday Catch-Up & Review Day #amwriting #nanowrimo #nanoprep

As a reminder, Saturdays throughout this challenge are going to be our days to review what we’ve covered during the week, and to catch up on anything we fell behind with. We had some big assignments this week, and some of you, like me, were still working to get caught up with previous weeks’ assignments, […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 20: The Road Map to Your Story #amwriting #nanoprep #nanowrimo

When it comes to planning your story before you start writing it, there are two directions you can go: plotting (outlining) and road mapping. Both will get you where you want to go. In fact, road mapping is a great kick-off point to get to plotting. So we’re going to look at both today as […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 19: Writing/Testing Your Story Premise

Now that we’ve had a few weeks to work on developing our characters, their external attributes, and their internal motivations and goals, it’s time to broaden our focus to the overview of our stories: the premise. It may sound absurd that we’ve put it off this long, because premise—or what your story is about—is one […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 18: Planning for Challenges and Obstacles

This is going to be more of a motivational post—and a “something to think about as we move forward” assignment/discussion question. But it’s something that’s very important to think about. However, I know that most of you, like me, are trying to get caught up with stuff from Week 2 and earlier this week. Please […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 17: Setting Goals and Tracking Everything #amwriting #nanoprep #nanowrimo

There’s not much that can be said about setting writing goals that hasn’t already been said. In fact, I did a series on it, which you can read/re-read here. So why don’t we go ahead and just jump into the meat of the matter. Part 1: Setting Word-Count Goals In order to figure out how […]

#FirstDraft60 Day 16: Inspiration vs. Perspiration (Writing Schedules) #amwriting #nanoprep #nanowrimo

Sorry there was no Sunday Reflections post yesterday. I’ve been fighting a weather-triggered migraine all week, and Sunday it got the better of me and I spent most of the day in bed. I’m hoping that (and some good drugs) will help knock it out and make Week 3 of FirstDraft60 much better, and more […]